ELEKTA ANNOUNCES FIRST TWO CLINICAL SITES USING VMAT CANCER TREATMENT CAPABILITY
PRESS RELEASE
Stockholm, Sweden, January 18, 2008
Elekta, a world leader in clinical solutions for radiation therapy and radiosurgery, announced today that two sites are utilizing Elekta technology to implement clinical treatments with Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT)*. With the recent CE designation of VMAT in Europe, the way has been cleared for The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, UK and General Hospital Vienna in Austria to treat cancer using Elekta’s VMAT solution.
VMAT is a significant improvement to existing advanced radiation therapy techniques, often referred to as IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) and offers a faster alternative to helical tomotherapy. With Elekta’s VMAT technology, the target continuously is irradiated while the source of the beam is rotated around the patient in single or multiple arcs. By simultaneously controlling gantry position, gantry speed, leaves of the multi-leaf collimator (MLC), collimator angle and dose rate, a highly conformal dose distribution is created in significantly less time than with today’s techniques. With VMAT from Elekta, a treatment session typically can be conducted in five minutes or less, including true 3D imaging to secure the location of the target.
“VMAT is a very promising technique,” says Dietmar Georg, Ph.D., head of the Division of Medical Radiation Physics, Department of Radiotherapy, Medical University Vienna/General Hospital Vienna. “The rotational therapy and intensity modulation results in improved dose distribution and high conformality for optimal sparing of normal tissue.” Using VMAT, Dr. Georg expects to see a more efficient workflow and faster treatments for patients receiving advanced radiotherapy.
Jim Warrington, head of Radiotherapy Physics at The Royal Marsden Hospital, says, “With the potential to produce megavoltage X-ray treatments of the highest quality and efficiency available, we anticipate VMAT will offer us greater flexibility as a radiotherapy treatment option.”
Both sites have installed the necessary system updates, and are eagerly anticipating the first VMAT treatments by the end of January.
Elekta leads the way with dynamic VMAT package
Elekta’s solution for VMAT treatments is a complete package that includes MOSAIQ™, an image-enabled oncology Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system that supports each member of the cancer care team. The package also contains ERGO++ the first treatment planning system to employ inverse-planning techniques for rotational IMRT. When combined with existing digital linear accelerators, this system provides a simple, innovative solution for clinical VMAT cancer treatment.
As VMAT technology becomes the new standard in cancer care, Elekta continues to lead the way with advanced solutions for treating serious disease.